The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

  MOYERS: So it is in this time of hunting man that we begin to sense a stirring of the mythic imagination, the wonder of things.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. There is a burst of magnificent art and all the evidence you need of a mythic imagination in full form.

  MOYERS: Do you ever look at these primitive art objects and think not of the art but of the man or woman standing there painting or creating? I find that I speculate—who was he or she?

  CAMPBELL: This is what hits you when you go into those ancient caves. What was in their minds as they created these images? How did they get up there? And how did they see anything? The only light they had was a little flickering torch.

  And with respect to the problem of beauty—is this beauty intended? Or is it something that is the natural expression of a beautiful spirit? Is the beauty of the bird’s song intentional? In what sense is it intentional? Or is it the expression of the bird, the beauty of the bird’s spirit, you might say? I think that way very often about this art. To what degree was the intention of the artist what we would call “aesthetic” or to what degree expressive? And to what degree is the art something that they had simply learned to do that way?

  When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature. It’s instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? How much of it is conscious and intentional? That is a big question.

  MOYERS: Tell me what you remember when you first looked upon those painted caves.

  CAMPBELL: You don’t want to leave. Here you come into an enormous chamber, like a great cathedral, with all these painted animals. The darkness is inconceivable. We were there with electric lights, but in a couple of instances the man who was showing us through turned off the lights, and you were never in darker darkness in your life. It was—I don’t know, just a complete knockout. You don’t know where you are, whether you are looking north, south, east, or west. All orientation is gone, and you are in a darkness that never saw the sun. Then they turn the lights on again, and you see these gloriously painted animals. And they are painted with the vitality of ink on silk in a Japanese painting—you know, just like that. A bull that will be twenty feet long, and painted so that its haunches will be represented by a swelling in the rock. They take account of the whole thing.

  MOYERS: You call them temple caves.

  CAMPBELL: Yes.

  MOYERS: Why?

  CAMPBELL: A temple is a landscape of the soul. When you walk into a cathedral, you move into a world of spiritual images. It is the mother womb of your spiritual life—mother church. All the forms around are significant of spiritual value.

  Now, in a cathedral, the imagery is in anthropomorphic form. God and Jesus and the saints and all are in human form. And in the caves the images are in animal form. But it’s the same thing, believe me. The form is secondary. The message is what is important.

  MOYERS: And the message of the caves?

  CAMPBELL: The message of the caves is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place.

  MOYERS: What were these caves used for?

  CAMPBELL: Scholars speculate that they had to do with the initiation of boys into the hunt. Boys had to learn hot only to hunt but how to respect the animals, and what rituals to perform, and how in their own lives no longer to be little boys but to be men. Those hunts, you see, were very, very dangerous. These caves are the original men’s rite sanctuaries where the boys became no longer their mothers’ sons but their fathers’ sons.

  MOYERS: What would happen to me as a child if I went through one of these rites?

  CAMPBELL: Well, we don’t know what they did in the caves, but we know what the aborigines do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be a little bit ungovernable, one fine day the men come in, and they are naked except for stripes of white bird down that they’ve stuck on their bodies using their own blood for glue. They are swinging the bull-roarers, which are the voices of spirits, and the men arrive as spirits.

  The boy will try to take refuge with his mother, and she will pretend to try to protect him. But the men just take him away. A mother is no good from then on, you see. You can’t go back to Mother, you’re in another field.

  Then the boys are taken out to the men’s sacred ground, and they’re really put through an ordeal—circumcision, subincision, the drinking of men’s blood, and so forth. Just as they had drunk mother’s milk as children, so now they drink men’s blood. They’re being turned into men. While this is going on, they are being shown enactments of mythological episodes from the great myths. They are instructed in the mythology of the tribe. Then, at the end of this, they are brought back to the village, and the girl whom each is to marry has already been selected. The boy has now come back as a man.

  He has been removed from his childhood, and his body has been scarified, and circumcision and subincision have been enacted. Now he has a man’s body. There’s no chance of relapsing back to boyhood after a show like that.

  MOYERS: You don’t go back to Mother.

  CAMPBELL: No, but in our life we don’t have anything like that. You can have a man forty-five years old still trying to be obedient to his father. So he goes to a psychoanalyst, who does the job for him.

  MOYERS: Or he goes to the movies.

  CAMPBELL: That might be our counterpart to mythological re-enactments—except that we don’t have the same kind of thinking going into the production of a movie that goes into the production of an initiation ritual.

  MOYERS: No, but given the absence of initiation rituals, which have largely disappeared from our society, the world of imagination as projected on that screen serves, even if in a faulty way, to tell that story, doesn’t it?

  CAMPBELL: Yes, but what is unfortunate for us is that a lot of the people who write these stories do not have the sense of their responsibility. These stories are making and breaking lives. But the movies are made simply to make money. The kind of responsibility that goes into a priesthood with a ritual is not there. That is one of our problems today.

  MOYERS: We have none of those rites today, do we?

  CAMPBELL: I’m afraid we don’t. So the youngsters invent them themselves, and you have these raiding gangs, and so forth—that is self-rendered initiation.

  MOYERS: So myth relates directly to ceremony and tribal ritual, and the absence of myth can mean the end of ritual.

  CAMPBELL: A ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.

  MOYERS: What does the absence of these myths mean to young boys today?

  CAMPBELL: Well, the confirmation ritual is the counterpart today of these rites. As a Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you are going to be confirmed by. But instead of scarifying you and knocking your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a smile and a slap on the cheek. It has been reduced to that. Nothing has happened to you. The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah. Whether it actually works to effect a psychological transformation will depend on the individual case, I suppose. But in those old days there was no problem. The boy came out with a different body, and he had really gone through something.

  MOYERS: What about the female? Most of the figures in the temple caves are male. Was this a kind of secret society for males?

  CAMPBELL: It wasn’t a secret society, it was that the boys had to go through it. Now of course we don’t know exactly what happened to the female in this period because there is very little evidence to tell us. But in primary cultures today the girl becomes a woman with her first menstruation. It happens to her. Nature does it to her. And so she has undergone the transformation, and what is her initiation? Typically it is to sit in a little hut for a certain number of days and realize what she is.

  MOYERS: How does she do that?

  CAMPBELL: She sits there. She is now a woman. And what is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about—the giving
of birth and the giving of nourishment. She is identical with the earth goddess in her powers, and she has got to realize that about herself. The boy does not have a happening of this kind, so he has to be turned into a man and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself.

  MOYERS: This is where the mythic imagination, as far as we know, began to operate.

  CAMPBELL: Yes.

  MOYERS: What were the chief themes of that era? Death?

  CAMPBELL: The mystery of death is one of them—which balances the theme of the mystery of life. It is the same mystery in its two aspects. The next theme is the relationship of this to the animal world, which dies and lives again.

  Then there is the motif of procuring food. The relationship of the woman to the nature of the outer world is there. Then we have to take into account the problem of the transformation of children into adults. That transformation is a fundamental concern throughout the ritual life of people. We have it today. There is the problem of turning ungovernable children, who express just the naive impulses of nature, into members of the society. That takes a lot of doing. These people could not tolerate anybody who wouldn’t follow the rules. The society couldn’t support them. They would kill them.

  MOYERS: Because they were a threat to the health of the whole?

  CAMPBELL: Well, of course. They were like cancers, something that was tearing the body apart. These tribal groups were living on the edge all the time.

  MOYERS: And yet out on the edge they began to ask fundamental questions.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. But the attitude toward dying wasn’t like ours at all. The notion of a transcendent world was really taken seriously.

  MOYERS: One important part of ancient ritual was that it made you a member of the tribe, a member of the community, a member of society. The history of Western culture has been the steadily widening separation of the self from society. “I” first, the individual first.

  CAMPBELL: I wouldn’t say that that’s characteristic of Western culture all the way because the separation is not a separation just of a raw biological entity. There has always been the spiritual import until very lately. Now, when you see old newsreels of the installation of the President of the United States, you see him wearing a top hat. President Wilson, even in his time, was wearing a top hat. He did not wear a top hat in his usual life. But, as President, he has a ritual aspect to his presence. Now it’s Johnny-come-lately walking in right off the golf course, you know, and sitting down with you and talking about whether we’re going to have atom bombs. It’s another style. There’s been a reduction of ritual. Even in the Roman Catholic Church, my God—they’ve translated the Mass out of ritual language and into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. The Latin of the Mass was a language that threw you out of the field of domesticity. The altar was turned so that the priest’s back was to you, and with him you addressed yourself outward. Now they’ve turned the altar around—it looks like Julia Child giving a demonstration—all homey and cozy.

  MOYERS: And they play a guitar.

  CAMPBELL: They play a guitar. They’ve forgotten that the function of ritual is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.

  MOYERS: And the ritual of a marriage ceremony pitches you out to the other.

  CAMPBELL: It certainly does. But the rituals that once conveyed an inner reality are now merely form. That’s true in the rituals of society as well as the personal rituals of marriage.

  MOYERS: So I can see why in some respects religious instruction has become obsolete to a lot of people.

  CAMPBELL: With respect to ritual, it must be kept alive. So much of our ritual is dead. It’s extremely interesting to read of the primitive, elementary cultures—how they transform the folk tales, the myths, all the time in terms of the circumstances. People move from an area where, let’s say, the vegetation is the main support, out into the plains. Most of our Plains Indians in the period of the horse-riding Indians had originally been of the Mississippifan culture. They lived along the Mississippi in settled dwelling towns and agriculturally based villages.

  And then they receive the horse from the Spaniards, which makes it possible to venture out into the plains and handle the great hunt of the buffalo herds. At this time, the mythology transforms from a vegetation mythology to a buffalo mythology. You can see the structure of the earlier vegetation mythologies underlying the mythologies of the Dakota Indians and the Pawnee Indians and the Kiowa, and so forth.

  MOYERS: You’re saying that the environment shapes the story?

  CAMPBELL: The people respond to the environment, you see. But now we have a tradition that doesn’t respond to the environment—it comes from somewhere else, from the first millennium B.C. It has not assimilated the qualities of our modern culture and the new things that are possible and the new vision of the universe.

  Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.

  MOYERS: You mean artists are the mythmakers of our day?

  CAMPBELL: The mythmakers of earlier days were the counterparts of our artists.

  MOYERS: They do the paintings on the walls, they perform the rituals.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. There’s an old romantic idea in German, das Volk dichtet, which says that the ideas and poetry of the traditional cultures come out of the folk. They do not. They come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted, whose ears are open to the song of the universe. These people speak to the folk, and there is an answer from the folk, which is then received as an interaction. But the first impulse in the shaping of a folk tradition comes from above, not from below.

  MOYERS: In these early elementary cultures, as you call them, who would have been the equivalent of the poets today?

  CAMPBELL: The shamans. The shaman is the person, male or female, who in his late childhood or early youth has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. It’s a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up, and the shaman falls into it. This shaman experience has been described many, many times. It occurs all the way from Siberia right through the Americas down to Tierra del Fuego.

  MOYERS: And ecstasy is a part of it.

  CAMPBELL: It iS.

  MOYERS: The trance dance, for example, in the Bushman society.

  CAMPBELL: Now, there’s a fantastic example of something. The Bushmen live in a desert world. It’s a very hard life, a life of great, great tension. The male and female sexes are, in a disciplined way, separate. Only in the dance do the two come together. And they come together this way. The women sit in a circle or in a little group and beat their thighs, setting a pace for the men dancing around them. The women are the center around which the men dance. And they control the dance and what goes on with the men through their own singing and beating of the thighs.

  MOYERS: What’s the significance, that the woman is controlling the dance?

  CAMPBELL: Well, the woman is life, and the man is the servant of life. That’s the basic idea in these things. During the course of the circling, which they do all night long, one of the men will suddenly pass out. He experiences what we might call a possession. But it is described as a flash, a kind of thunderbolt or lightning bolt, which passes from the pelvic area right up the spine into the head.

  MOYERS: It is described in your book The Way of the Animal Powers—here:

  CAMPBELL: “When people sing, I dance. I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far.” He’s entranced now, and this is a description of an experience. “When I emerge, I am already climbing. I’m climbing threads, the threads that lie over there in the south. I climb one and leave it, then I climb another one. Then I leave it and climb another.… And when you arrive at God’s place, you make yourself small. You have become small. You come in small to God’s place. You do what you
have to do there. Then you return to where everyone is, and you hide your face. You hide your face so you won’t see anything. You come and come and come and finally you enter your body again. All the people who have stayed behind are waiting for you—they fear you. You enter, enter the earth, and you return to enter the skin of your body.… And you say ‘he-e-e-e!’ That is the sound of your return to your body. Then you begin to sing. The ntum-masters are there around.” Ntum is the supernatural power. “They take powder and blow it—Phew! Phew!—in your face. They take hold of your head and blow about the sides of your face. This is how you manage to be alive again. Friends, if they don’t do that to you, you die.… You just die and are dead. Friends, this is what it does, this ntum that I do, this ntum here that I dance.”

  My God! This guy’s had an experience of another whole realm of consciousness!. In these experiences they are, as it were, flying through the air.

  MOYERS: He then becomes the shaman.

  CAMPBELL: Not in this culture. He becomes the trance dancer. All the men are potentially tranced.

  MOYERS: Is there something like this common in the experience of our culture? I’m thinking particularly of the born-again experience in our Southern culture.

  CAMPBELL: There must be. This is an actual experience of transit through the earth to the realm of mythological imagery, to God, to the seat of power. I don’t know what the born-again Christian experience is. I suppose medieval visionaries who saw visions of God and brought back stories of that would have had a comparable experience.

  MOYERS: There’s a sense of ecstasy, isn’t there, in this experience?

  CAMPBELL: As reported, it’s always of ecstasy.